The Primacy of Love

    

    We made it to 2024! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, or at least one where you were able to connect with some people you love and care about! Our family's break was sweet but felt pretty busy still. We took Elias down to Austin for the last couple of weeks which was really nice. He did great on the trip and being down there, and it was really meaningful to have some extended time to catch up with our families and celebrate Christmas with them. After that we went to our winter staff retreat in Burnett.

    Those staff retreats are always rejuvenating and inspiring to me. I love connected with my fellow pastors and hearing about their ministry and the things they are learning, and also having the opportunity to have more unrushed time with the Lord. One of my favorite things about working with FOCUS is our intentionality in making sure we are still growing as pastors and providing retreats and things like that to help us work towards that.

    We are also continually learning and reading new things (or at least new to us). This winter break we all read a book called To Love as God loves by Roberta Bondi. It looked at the early church and early monastics and what they had to say about the Christian life. I wanted to share what the book got me pondering. The major thrust of the book was that for the early church, everything a disciple did was oriented around love. Not a new concept by any means, most of us would say that should be the focus of a Christ centered life. What stood out to me was how terrible we often are at actually doing that though. So often we get distracted by things that take our attention off loving God and others, and I’m not talking about just doom scrolling. Sometimes what distracts us are actually good things, things that may have even started out with a root in love, but over time what was just a means to get to love becomes the goal for us outright. Things like doing a good job at work, learning more about theology or scripture, taking care of things around the house, fun hobbies, what have you. Obviously, those things aren’t bad, what is dangerous is letting those means of loving become the goal and focus of our life. Putting the cart before the horse. For Christians, though we may do many things in our lives, the ultimate driving force behind it should be to love God and love others, and to grow in both of those things throughout our life. When I look at my life, I see how often I am failing at loving perfectly, or anything close to that, which in fairness is to be expected. But while I may be a long way off of loving perfectly, it’s something I want to pursue as the early Christians did. I want love to be the driving force behind all that I do in my life. So, I’ve been reflecting on this question, and I wanted to share it with you as well as we head into a new year.

What am I tempted to make the goal of my life and why is it not love?